Your Black Friday offer is ready. What about your sender reputation?

Every November I see the same thing across dozens of hotels: the revenue team locks the Black Friday offer weeks in advance, the email goes out on the 24th at 09:00, and nobody has checked whether the domain is authenticated or the list has been cleaned in two years. Hospitality Net has just published a pre-Black Friday checklist that lands exactly there, on what almost nobody reviews: sender reputation, list hygiene, authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and send timing.

The underlying idea is simple and, in my view, correct. A campaign with a 30% discount can end up in the promotions tab or straight in spam if the domain has been cold for months or if you are dragging hard bounces from previous sends. In hotels, where a direct booking is worth far more than an OTA commission, blowing a Black Friday send is blowing margin.

My take: this checklist should be taped to the CRM wall from October. Segment, clean, authenticate and send in batches. No offer is good enough to survive bad inbox placement.